Loved
by Sarapsys
Summary: A week and some hours is not enough time to spend with your only child.


**AN: Man, I _love _this movie. Just a quick blurb that occurred to me this morning.**

**Megamind belongs to Dreamworks.**

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><p><strong>Loved<strong>

After centuries of war, peace has finally come to the Glaupunkt Quadrant. Unfortunately for everyone, it's far too little, far too late. It's really less that there's been real reconciliation, and more that everyone is too focused on their own personal impending doom to start pointing fingers. _If we hadn't created this weapon. If they hadn't destroyed it without taking proper precautions in dismantling the subzero free-string core._ Blame becomes remarkably irrelevant when you're intractably caught in the event horizon of a black hole.

Well, most would say intractably.

Ktemnik Pakeltr Tkoppletskor Glemmitk III is convinced there's a way out. Interstellar travel—it's possible. It _has _to be. He's done the math, and his wife has double-checked it. And the velocity required would warp time just enough to escape the ravenous gravity of the artificial black hole.

"Any luck getting through to them?" Emlanekma shouts without turning off the welding torch when he rushes back into their workshop. Taking only a pair of instants to fervently admire how amazing she is (she should still be in bed so soon after giving birth) and to scoop up his son for a quick kiss on the forehead, Ktemnik lunges back into their work. Sixteen hours and counting down is not a lot of time to build the first-ever interstellar space pod.

"Nobody was there," he shouts back over the roar of the torch. He's just returned from the Hall of Hearings, in hopes of relating their half-baked invention to their government leaders. It's far from a civilization-saving plan, but if it could make a difference for even a few families—

See the thing is, there's a catch. Interstellar travel _is _mathematically possible. But the object doing the traveling has to be small. _Really _small. As in, unless you're a contortionist (or, for example, a seven-day-old infant) you're not going to be taking a trip to the next galaxy over until another quantum leap in technology.

That's why the project has been on the backburner for so long, why he's never tried it before now, when it's critical. They're inventors, not astronomers, and why shoot for the pie in the sky when there are just-as-exciting desserts in much closer reach? How could they have known?

"What about you? Did anyone get the message?"

"I put the specifications on the Wire and sent them to everyone I knew with—with a baby," Emlanekma says, her voice catching a little. "And—I sent them to the Regent on Borkancha. No idea if he's sent it out to his people or not."

_As if any Borkanchan blockhead jock could build a space pod in the space of hours! _Ktemnik thinks, but the war is as good as dead so there's no point wasting time that could be put toward the last-ditch effort to save his only child thinking sour things about their planetary neighbors.

There's so much to do, even with the core of the engine finished—life support, navigation. And the helper fish to program, with far more information than is probably healthy to do all at once like this. They can't finish everything they'd like to; the stabilizers are far from optimal and there's certainly not time to paint and polish the hull (Ktemnik focuses on these things, rather than the much more glaring problem of _not knowing _if there's a safe planet, a populated planet, anywhere close enough for the pod to reach).

In the end, though, if they _had_ had a few more hours to shine the outside of the pod, they probably would have spent it playing with their baby. A mere week and some hours is not long enough to spend with your only child. Whenever she's not powering a vacuum drill or a welding torch Emlanekma keeps the infant strapped to her chest, talking to him almost constantly. Whenever Ktemnik passes, he makes sure to caress the baby's head, or touch his fingers for a moment. He'll remember these first few days, and it's vital for him to know he's loved.

They couldn't bear to die knowing their son would survive thinking nobody had cared for him.


End file.
